China white

La French (The connection)

Crit

A familiar story told from a perspective both unfamiliar (from Marseilles rather than New York) and familiar (an obsessed hero and good old-fashioned police procedure). Wish I had time to watch The French Connection this weekend.

The red and the blecchh

L'homme qu'on aimait trop (In the name of my daughter)

Crit

Until late in this film, I found it an annoyingly tedious account of unpleasant people behaving stupidly, with one lead--Adèle Haenel as Agnès, daughter of Catherine Deneuve's casino boss Renée Le Roux--giving one of the worst French acting performances since Marshal Pétain's. Then 28 years passed and everyone but Haenel and Deneuve got unconvincing age makeup, and a bad film turned utterly idiotic.

I might not have gone had it cost me any money, but it did cost me 2 valuable hours from my ever-dwindling supply.

Raptor

Good Kill

Crit

Doesn't January Jones worry that she'll be typecast as the go-to beautiful wife of an emotionally unavailable man? At least Don Draper killed only by proxy, encouraging Americans to eat and drink and smoke things that are bad for them (and even backed off on the smoking, as I recall). Though I suppose you could say Major Tommy Egan (Ethan Hawke) kills by proxy, too, pulling a trigger from a base outside Las Vegas in order to blow up a target in Afghanistan or Pakistan or Yemen. The moral implications of the PlayStation war and the collateral domestic damage are sensitively explored, and it might have been an excellent film had not (I never thought I'd object to this) the CIA (Christians in Action, as the Air Force calls is) been painted in such unremittingly satanic colors.

Drive angry

Mad Max: Fury Road

Crit

It's the best film of the early "summer" featuring a form of the word "Mad" in the title and the participation of Thomas/Tom Hardy, though only the second-most-breakneck paced.

Max has learned a lot over the years, and so have I: for example, I no longer own a car and thus am not tempted to drive insanely fast when I come out of the theater.

Trailers

• Vacation--Never saw any of the first batch, not likely to see the reboot.
• Crimson Park--Haunted house pic by [wait for it . . . ] Guillermo del Toro!
• Dope--Great early buzz on this pic about middle-class, college-bound African-American kids who go to the decidedly wrong party.
• The Last Witch Hunter--is Vin Diesel.
• San Andreas--The fault, dear Brutus, is in our West Coast, and it's a motherfucker.

Or die trying

Pre-holiday weekend early closing double feature

Slow West

Crit

In case you hadn't yet figured it out, the nearly final montage makes it clear that no matter how the 21st century has redefined the western as something quirky and antiheroic and myth remaking, the old West was most efficient as a killing field.

Jay (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is the young naïf, in the New World looking for his one true Rose, who has come to America with her father after an "accident" forced them to flee Scotland. Silas (Michael Fassbinder) is the thoroughly disillusioned bounty hunter, who becomes Jay's chaperon while pursuing his own agenda.

Spoiler alert: bad things happen.

Hundraåringen som klev ut genom fönstret och försvann (The 100-year-old man who climbed out the window and disappeared

Crit

An determinedly quirky and whimsical and off-beat tale of a sort of pyrotechnic Swedish Zelig--a tale, in fact, that works so hard being quirky and whimsical and off-beat that after amusing me for about 10 minutes, it annoyed me for the next hour and left me thoroughly exhausted by the end of its overlong 114-minute running time.

Trailers

• Infinitely Polar Bear--Bipolar Dad raising two adorable (oh: and racially mixed, thus making them even more adorable) daughters while Mom pursues career opportunities in the big city.
• Mr. Holmes--Sherlock is senile, but on the other hand, he's also Ian McKellen.

Speed dating

When-it-rains-it-pours Local 3

Two weeks of nothing opening downtown that I want to see, then 5 openings this week. Since I'm going to a Mets game tomorrow, that means that even with one yesterday and three today, I'm still deferring Mad Max: Fury Road.

Pitch Perfect 2

Crit

Well, that was disappointing: about a half-dozen smart lines, one funny running sexual confusion joke, and a lot of labored writing and clumsy plotting leading up to zero surprise.

Leaving only the musical numbers, which are admittedly terrific. Am I actually in danger of becoming an a cappella fan? No, probably not. And right now I don't feel in much danger of seeing Pitch Perfect 3.

Wait, did I say zero surprise? Not so: what about Snoop Dogg singing "Winter Wonderland"? Wonderfully surreal. Even better was recognizing one of the Bella alumnae as a beautiful woman with whom another beautiful woman and I spent an evening in a Chicago hotel room many years ago. Trust me, if I told you any more of the story, you'd only be disappointed.

Felix et Meira

Crit

Young Hasidic wife and mother Meira (Hadas Yaron) is starved for music, romance, and ping-pong; Félix (Martin Dubreuil), the estranged secular son of a recently dead father, provides all three. In the way we generally stack our narrative decks, that should be enough for us to root for their escape from Montreal to Brooklyn and then to Venice, but her husband, Shulem (Luzer Twersky), is inconveniently not terrible, has a fair claim to their daughter, and even loves his wife, as best he can.

Yet another film with a Graduate ending, this one in a gondola.

Far from the Madding Crowd

Crit

Yikes! I've never read the book, and I never saw the 1967 film, but this baby is like a Victorian novel on crystal meth. BIG THINGS happen every 5 minutes, mostly Bathsheba (accent on the first syllable, to my surprise) Everdeen (Carey Mulligan, looking appropriately 19th century) saying no, maybe, or yes to one of the three men who want to marry her.

But everything happens so fast that apart from her laudable but one-note ambition Not to Be Any Man's Property, there's no time to really figure out whether she or any of the men has motivations that make sense of their actions. It's all too zoomy.

Trailers

• Minions--The backstory. 
• Jem and the Holograms--Success, betrayal, redemption. Yawn. 
• Insidious Chapter 3--Somehow I missed Chapters 1 and 2.
• Inside Out--Best under-the-radar line in a movie ostensibly for children: "There are no bears in San Francisco."
• Me and Earl and the Dying Girl--This theme (or at least the YA subgenre that mines this theme) has become the source of some surprisingly good films, and this looks promising.
• Aloha--Great cast, but suspect.

Going in style

Iris

Crit

No dedicated follower of fashion is nonagenarian Iris Apfel. Nor is she some snobby, judgmental leader of fashion. No, if someone who is neither fashionable nor stylish may make the distinction, what Iris is has nothing to do with fashion and everything to do with style. And though she works hard to find things that speak to her style, the style itself is effortless, is simply who she is.

The latest entry in films ostensibly on topics about which I have zero interest that are reviewed so positively I can't miss them and end up wowing me. One of the last films directed by documentarian Albert Maysles, who died in May (and with whom Iris chats and flirts throughout).